Happy And Healthy Lifestyle

“There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.” ~ Charles Dickens “It’ll be okay, just…” If I could have taken that expression and thrown it at each person who said it to me when I was struggling with depression, it would have felt much better than hearing it each time. Here are a few ways people ended that sentence: “Try not to think about it.” “Cheer up.” “Get some exercise.“ “See someone about it.” All well-intentioned, true, and completely unhelpful. I didn’t need to hear advice, or pointers or solutions. I just needed them to be present, to remind me I wasn’t alone. I was in a new town, totally broken, in despair, having had no physical rest for weeks. I couldn’t pray, couldn’t read (I tried), couldn’t sleep, and felt like moving forward was the most insurmountable task of my life. I could write a book about my journey to and through depr...

“The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh My daughter began taking tumbling classes a week before her eighth birthday. She had been dancing since the age of three, and those classes included instructions for cartwheels and roundoffs. The harder stuff, like the back walkover, required tumbling or gymnastics classes, and she wanted the chance to be able to show off those moves during the annual dance recital. My wife wasn’t interested in watching our daughter repeatedly and blindly dive backward in a bendy arch, each time hoping her hands met the ground firmly enough to slow down the momentum of her trailing head and torso. But I was interested. Her dancing wasn’t exciting to me at that point because the skills involved weren’t physically challenging yet. That would come later. But each b...

“ Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It is not meant to be how you live. ” ~Michele Rosenthal Childhood is the most cherished time for many. However, nobody gets to adulthood unscathed. We all go through incidents with our friends, family, and at school or otherwise that leave us feeling emotionally bruised or scarred. Growing up in a household where my parents were busy raising three kids and working hard to better their economic status, somewhere along the way I felt neglected. Not that they did anything intentionally, but I was often plagued, even overwhelmed, by feelings of being misunderstood, lonely, not good enough, and generally not deserving. It was only after years of people-pleasing, choosing a wrong master’s degree, and climbing the corporate ladder with a great job, that the suppressed feelings erupted like a volcano. The result? It made me physically sick with allergies, constant body aches, and rashes that didn’t allow me to sleep, pus...

“Intuition is the whisper of the soul.” ~Jiddu Krishnamurti “I can’t believe they are taking her side over mine. I gave this job so many years, and she decides to walk in and mess it all up for me,” I said to my husband. A few years back, when I was working full time at my corporate job, I got into a disagreement with a team member. It spiraled out of control to the point where my boss then had to have a sit-down with us. I was so humiliated and angry that he could not see my side. They will realize when they lose you , whispered my ego. That was when I decided to leave. I started to look for new jobs and got offers. Now here is the thing—I did have a great job, I had a great team, no long hours, and I liked what I did. But at that moment, due to that disagreement, I made a decision to leave it all from a place of anger. Tony Robbins often says It is in your moments of decisions that your destiny is shaped. I wish I knew this back then. I took the new job, but the moment I acce...

“Perfectionism is the exhausting state of pretending to know it all and have it all together, all the time. I’d rather be a happy mess than an anxious stress case who’s always trying to hide my flaws and mistakes.” ~Lori Deschene  “That’s not how you do it!” I slammed the door as I headed outside, making sure my husband understood what an idiot he was. He’d made the appalling mistake of roasting potatoes for Thanksgiving instead of making stuffing. He was cooking while I studied, trying to make sure I got a semblance of a holiday. We lived away from our families, and I had exams coming up. I was on the verge of losing it most of the time—and he was walking on eggshells. Or roasted potatoes. I was in my first year of law school. Every student knows that if you look to your left and then to your right that one of those people won’t be there next year—they will have dropped out or failed. I was terrified of failing. Every morning, I had a pounding headache that no amount of painkille...

“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.” ~Walter Elliott I often find myself impatient with the pace of my progress. Waiting for my life to move forward can sometimes feel like I’m watching paint dry. There are so many moments when we feel like our life is at a standstill. This is generally where I double down with my intensity. I hit it with everything I can. The crash comes soon after from the inevitable violent collision of my mind, body, and spirit as they’re pushed beyond their limits. The idea of having to wait for anything is a first-world problem. The thought that your cat’s costume might not arrive in time for Halloween is enough to bring some people to tears. Just thinking of Mr. Whiskers having to go out as a plain ol’ cat is a bloody crime. And that’s waiting for a cat costume . What about that book you wish would just write itself? What about that scale that still shows you being forty pounds heavier than you want to be? What abo...

“When it is obvious the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” ~Confucius Do you want to know my biggest fear? I’ve just come out of the closet, my parents have rejected me, and I am terrified, really, really terrified, because I’m completely alone, and the pain is unbearable. But it’s not just the rejection that terrifies me—it’s also what happens after that. With no one to turn to, I find comfort at the bottom of a bag of chips. Three months and thirty pounds later I’ve yet to leave the confines of my bedroom. I’m wasting away, haunted by dead dreams, dirty dishes, and empty soda cans. The depression is unbearable. I feel like I’ll never be able to turn things around. I look in the mirror and don’t recognize this person looking back at me. I’ve resigned myself to a life of sadness, solitude, and self-neglect. It feels as though everything is hopeless and I’ll never to amount to anything in life. Feelings of depression, lack of confidence, a...

^This is the best one I could find where an inner voice is both angry-ish and talking to the person. The rest were all just okay anger photos. The description of the photo is “anger talking to you.” “When we embrace anger and take good care of our anger, we obtain relief. We can look deeply into it and gain many insights.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh It just took a few words from my husband before I felt my body move from calm to a boiling cauldron of rage. My whole being was alight, in flames. Energy felt like it was moving through me and shattering everything inside me. I hated it. Anger is so intense, and so big, that most of us can’t bear to feel it in our bodies. I wanted to do a lot of things—shout at him, throw things, scream the house down, offer rageful thoughts to anyone who would listen. I wanted this anger out of my body. NOW. In the past I have reacted to these inner sensations and launched arguments that could last hours or even days. I would rarely get anything other than a...

“Do your best and be okay with that.” ~Ursula Wharton Late one evening I was doing some work at the last minute when my phone buzzed with a text from Alex, my neighbor’s boyfriend. They said they were rushing over and then I saw, “Chris is trying to kill themselves. You gotta get in there and stop them.” I felt sick to my stomach. I stood up too fast from my chair and dropped my phone onto the ugly grey carpet beneath my bare feet. I rushed to Chris’s apartment, which was right next to mine. Thankfully, the door was unlocked and led to the living room where Chris was writing on a piece of paper. Tears furiously ran down their beet red face. Chris looked at me, scared with hands shaking, and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” My heart pounded against my chest. I kept my voice calm as I tried to get Chris to explain what had happened, but they just cried and I cried with them. I tried to keep Chris safe and their mind away from hurting themselves. I was terrified they had already don...

“When you are resting because you are worn out, you need to remember that you are not wasting time. You are doing exactly what you need to do. You are recovering.” ~Unknown I woke up at 3am when I heard my alarm ring. I slowly pulled my arm away from my son, who was half holding my arm and half lying on it, so that he didn’t wake up. I tip-toed out of bed while my husband and my son were sleeping. My eyes ached and were blurry from sleep deprivation. My head felt like I was floating in the air. But even so, I couldn’t sleep any longer. Knowing that just in a few hours, I would have another fully busy day at work, with deadlines all over my head, and I’d have to deal with all the mails marked “urgent” yesterday before getting to today’s mail. My sleepiness went away quickly as I started to feel butterflies in my stomach. Not in a good way. The deadlines, the rush and anxiety, all kicked in. I felt like I wanted to cry. And so I did a little. But I felt like I shouldn’t feel that ...

“The future never comes. Life is always now.” ~Eckhart Tolle “Jump, and the net will catch you.” “Leap, and the net will appear.” This piece of writing is to make a case for the following argument: there is NO net. Before I put forward my reasoning, please bear with me for a moment while my ego rattles off the times I have jumped (but the net never appeared). I quit my well-paid marketing role and traveled across the world to pursue a humanitarian dream job. I failed at the job interview and was jobless and in despair in a foreign land. I invested some of my savings into launching an online e-commerce site selling organic products but was diagnosed with blood cancer shortly after launch and had to give it up. I threw myself into the wellness industry in an attempt to heal my cancer. Nothing worked, and I ended up on the medication I was desperately trying to avoid. I poured my heart and soul into a memoir but have, so far, only received nice rejections from the publishing indu...

“Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion.” ~Lynn Crilly Every emotion is felt by the body in a different way. Pain can be sharp and biting, with a desire to lash out. Anxiety can also be sharp and biting, but with a desire to lash within. Sadness can feel like your body turning into stone, making every step seem impossible. We all feel these emotions at times, but holding onto them is what causes damage. We must learn to shed them, as any “negative” emotion, if held on for too long, can release toxins that destroy our bodies over time. Often, emotions like anger and anxiety and even sadness are symptoms of a more destructive emotion that destroys the human spirit. Robs us of our joy. And is unquestionably the heaviest of all emotional sensations we feel. That emotion is guilt. An emotion I carried around for so many years that was the root cause of many other destructive emotions I felt. Before I went on this journey within, I was always vacillating between feeli...